SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD: Stories from the Lotus Sutra

Dogen-Zenji so cherished the Lotus Sutra that he actually carved a selection of it into his door. This, the core text of not only Zen but the whole of Mahayana Buddhism, has never lost its appeal among practitioners of the Way. Join us for our SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD: Stories From the Lotus Sutra led by Sensei Joshin Byrnes, Sensei Genzan Quennell

Natalie Goldberg on Dogen

I’m adamant as a teacher that you’ve got to write, you can’t talk about writing. You can’t go to a therapist and discuss why you’re not writing. You can’t talk about the future when you’re going to write. You have to plunge in right now. Often I’m interviewed and people say to me, well what would you tell people? What’s the one thing you would tell me? I say, Shut up and Write. Pick up the pen and physically do it. And I think that I understood that through Dogen because really, we can have a lovely discussion about Dogen and we are—I mean I’m loving the discussion about Dogen—but finally, if you want to meet Dogen, all of you and me too, you have to sit. Because in sitting the world opens and you can meet him because he’s been sitting and his writing is coming out of that big world. We can’t meet it unless we’re sitting too. At the same time, we can’t be narrow. If I don’t sit, I can’t do Dogen because there’s also the idea that moment by moment is practice and everything we do, if we see it from a practice perspective, you can meet Dogen after you wash the dishes.

If I’m completely honest I would say I don’t know. I think that comes from, I studied with Katagiri Roshi who was Japanese and whose English wasn’t perfect and that really transmitted Dogen through our bodies. It was completely a physical practice. He spoke about Dogen all the time but it was really physically that it was transmitted. I feel that I don’t know because I feel like that I carry it in my body. I can name things that I love, but that’s the deepest— that’s the deepest truth.